Variations on Rockdodger

VoR is a simple, fast-paced action game that will challenge your reflexes. It has excellent gameplay, great physics, good graphics, and a retro/synthoid thumpy beat to help put you in the mood for old-school 2D gaming.

Status

VoR is very stable, well polished and loads of fun! Jason Woofenden is working on getting it into the major GNU/Linux distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and OpenSUSE).

We have not been adding new features lately (2010), however, we will certainly work to fix any bugs or compatibility issues if they are discovered.

Screenshot

A shower of sparks is starting to shoot from the right thruster as the pilot tries to lose a little momentum.

Help out!

Please help us by making VoR easily available on other operating systems!

In particular we'd love to get someone technical make a Mac binary. The source code compiles fine on Mac. The work is mainly collecting the libraries and creating a bundle. Please contact Jason Woofenden about getting transparency to work.

Requirements

If you want to change the graphics or work from the repository, you'll also need: povray, netpbm. (On some distribution(s) the necessary part of netpbm is in the package "netpbm-progs".)

Notes

This is a fairly hard game, intended to be a quickie game for when you
want to kill a few spare minutes. For reference, my best time [Josh Grams]
is about 2 minutes in version 0.3. I'm not generally very good at video games,
but I have been playing this one for quite a while now. However, as of version
0.4, there is an easier mode (press '1' for an easy game).

The most important thing is to tap the keys very gently!
Overcontrolling is the leading cause of death among new rockdodgers!

As an exercise, try using only the shortest taps you can manage. On
the easier difficulty setting, it's usually possible to reach 30
seconds with 15 (or less!) very brief pulses of the jets. It's often
good to kill your speed with a pulse on the opposite jet once you're
clear of the rock you were avoiding.

History

Jason Woofenden and Josh Grams like rockdodger very much: both
playing it and hacking on it. VoR is the result. They forked from rockdodger
0.4.2 in the summer of 2004, and over the next few years rewrote or refactored most of the codebase. The premise is still the same:
dodge the rocks until you die; almost everything else has been modified in some
way or another.

User-Visible Changes

0.5.4:

New music and explosion sound

Key to toggle full-screen mode

0.5:

Lots of bug fixes, including a rounding error that caused crashes on x86.

Tweaks to engine and explosion.

New font.

0.4:

Rocks now bounce off each other, and are pushed by particles.

Now with two difficulties: normal and easy.

Better new ship placement after you die.

0.3:

Scrolls to the right so you can zoom ahead.

Fully random rock generation; rocks no longer wrap vertically.

Rocks' relative speeds are now uniform in all directions (i.e. much more up/down
speed variation). Noticeably hard...err...more "interesting".

Command-line option --game-speed.

0.2:

New graphics, generated by POV-Ray. Yeah, okay, the ship is really cheesy.
At least the rocks are cool.

Real collision detection; no more "ship is 1 pixel bigger
all around than it looks."